Hans and Franz were
characters in a recurring sketch called "Pumping Up with Hans &
Franz" on the television sketch comedy show Saturday Night Live. Hans and
Franz themselves were played by Dana Carvey and Kevin Nealon, respectively.

In the sketch,
Carvey and Nealon play a pair of muscle-bound Austrian jocks who
mimicked/spoofed Arnold Schwarzenegger by using padding for fake muscles, drab
gray sweatsuits, weight belts, and Austrian accents. The background of the set
includes several life-sized cutouts of Schwarzenegger during his competition
years and the sketch's introduction music featured mock Austrian
"yodeling".

"Pumping
Up" primarily consists of Hans and Franz denigrating others for not being
strong and as physically "fit" as they were, and then striking
bodybuilder poses to show off their "muscled" bodies, complete with
strained facial expressions. The two finally receive their just deserts when
Arnold Schwarzenegger himself makes a guest appearance on the sketch (to much
applause) and ridicules "his cousins" for being girlie and weak.

A movie was in the
works for a short time, entitled Hans and Franz go to Hollywood but was
scrapped once producers saw poor box office performances from such SNL
sketch-inspired movies as Stuart Saves His Family and It's Pat. In late 2010,
on the Conan program, Conan O'Brien and Nealon discussed how they were holed up
in a Santa Monica hotel room for a month or so in the early nineties with
Carvey and Robert Smigel, working on a script for the movie (which was to be a
musical).

A short sketch
spoofing VH1's Behind the Music specials was filmed for the show's 1999
primetime 25th Anniversary Special, but time constraints prevented it from
airing. It went on to appear in a later episode that season. In the sketch,
Hans and Franz tell the story of how they were reunited in Hollywood when Franz
unsuspectingly has his buttocks "read" by Hans.

Cultural references

This sketch was one
of the most popular on SNL, and the characters and their catchphrases entered
American pop culture. When Schwarzenegger entered politics, he referred to the
sketches himself, using the phrases "girlie men" and "pump you
up." He even used the "girlie men" term during the 1988
Presidential election. Accompanying then Vice President George H.W. Bush, he
attacked Bush's Democratic opponents by saying to the crowd: “They all look
like a bunch of girlie men, right?" He used the phrase again to attack
California state legislators in speeches during his election campaign for
governor of California.

The two
Crawler-transporter vehicles used by NASA are nicknamed "Hans" and
"Franz" after the SNL characters.[1]

Two Designers from
Germany, Konstantin Landuris and Horst Wittmann, work under the name of
"hansandfranz", inspired by the "SNL" namegiving.

In the West Wing
season 6 episode "The Wake Up Call", President Bartlet refers to the
British prime minister's press conference as "getting all Hans &
Franz" about the alleged shooting down of a British airplane by Iran.

Hans and Franz also
appeared in the Cranium Command attraction in the Wonders of Life pavilion at
Walt Disney World Resort's Epcot theme park.

In a Tiny Toon
Adventures episode parodying SNL sketches, Buster and Plucky play as
"Sigmund and Raymond", and played the sketch on "blowing
up" their visitors. Hamton shows up and he is pumped with air.

Hale and Hardy, the
accented, musclebound dachshunds in Garfield Gets Real, are likely based on
Hans and Franz.

In 2008, Team Four
Star released an episode of Dragonball Z Abridged featuring Goz and Mez, two
characters that act like Hans and Franz. [2]

In the 2009 video
game Borderlands, the player partakes in a boss fight against a pair of beefy,
muscular men named Hans and Franz, a reference to the SNL duo. -Wikipedia